The Dunkirk Spirit

…and the miracle of deliverance

The Officer’s Wife opens in 1939 at the outbreak of war when newly-wed Vivi says goodbye to her husband Nathan, a naval officer, who has been recalled to his ship. She doesn’t see him for ten months.

It’s May 1940 and the Allies are retreating towards the French coast, cut off and surrounded by the German army, stranded at the port of Dunkirk to either perish or be captured by the enemy. In my story, Nathan’s ship is part of Operation Dynamo to evacuate the soldiers and bring them back home. As he sails towards the French coast, he would have seen the seafront houses silhouetted against the sky, the harbour wrecked, oil tanks burning, billowing smoke and, across the flat sandy beach, great snaking columns of men stretching down to the sea. And while they wait to be rescued, some standing up to their shoulders in the water, the Luftwaffe bomb and strafe them. As Sir Winston Churchill said, on 19 May 1940, ‘It would be foolish to disguise the gravity of the hour.’ 

A call for assistance goes out to commandeer all private boats with a shallow draft to ferry soldiers from the beaches to the waiting naval ships, like Nathan’s. The hastily assembled fleet of around 800 vessels, including pleasure cruisers, yachts, lifeboats, and fishing boats – The Little Ships – start sailing from Ramsgate at the end of May.

My character Elise volunteers at a Margate hospital to help the injured returning soldiers and looks after Nathan who is badly injured. She has seen the newspaper photographs of returning Tommies, all cheerful with cigarettes and cups of tea. But the terrible suffering and injuries she witnesses at the hospital are an entirely different story. 

To keep up morale, the unfolding disaster is not fully reported, with bulletins saying that the evacuation is going to plan. But Dunkirk is in chaos, with abandoned vehicles, weapons and equipment littering the area and soldiers on the edge of despair on the beaches.

Nathan recovers slowly, but throughout the novel, he can barely speak to Vivi, Elise or anyone about his experiences, what it meant to him to have seen men under his command die. To have sailed to Dunkirk to help, and ended up incapacitated himself. 

But in the space of eight days, more than 338,000 Allied soldiers are evacuated, and above it all, is tremendous courage and solidarity in adversity. The true Dunkirk Spirit is born, epitomised by the discipline of people holding their nerve in the face of great crisis, to ensure that they survive, regroup and fight another day. In his ‘We shall fight on the beaches’ speech on 4 June 1940, Churchill described it as ‘a miracle of deliverance’.

While researching my novel, I discovered a quote from a real-life evacuated soldier Harry Garret. On his way back across the Channel, when he finally saw the White Cliffs of Dover in the distance, he said that it was like a miracle had happened. That he went from hell to heaven*.

The Officer’s Wife is available in paperback, ebook and audio. Click here for Amazon link.

[*Reported in Forgotten Voices of the Second World War, a book compiled in association with the Imperial War Museum.]